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THE EARTH SPEAKS 
TO BRYAN 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR 


THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 
IMPRESSIONS OF GREAT NATURALISTS 
MEN OF THE OLD STONE AGE 

THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE 

THE AGE OF MAMMALS 

EVOLUTION OF MAMMALIAN MOLAR TEETH 
FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


HUXLEY AND EDUCATION 





TO BRYAN 


BY /, ff 


rd 


HENRY FAIRFIELD ‘OSBORN 


LL.D., TRIN., PRINC., COLUMB.; HON. D.8C., CAMB., YALE 


RESEARCH PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY, 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 


SENIOR GEOLOGIST, U. S. GEOL. SURVEY 


PRESIDENT, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1925 


CopyRIGHT, 1923, 1925, By 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


CHAP. II, COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES 
CHAP. III, IV, V, COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY THE FORUM PUBLISHING COMPANY 


Printed in the United States of America 
Second Edition 





TO 


JOHN THOMAS SCOPES 
COURAGEOUS TEACHER 


WHO ELECTED TO FACE SQUARELY THE ISSUE THAT 
THE YOUTH OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE SHOULD BE 
FREELY TAUGHT THE TRUTHS OF NATURE AND THE FACT 
THAT THESE TRUTHS ARE CONSISTENT WITH THE 
HIGHEST IDEALS OF RELIGION AND CONDUCT 


THE TRUTH 
SHALL MAKE YOU FREE 





IIT. 


IV. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
Toe TENNESSEE TRIAL. ...... 1 
The author states the real issue. 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. ..... 17 
The author’s first reply to Bryan. 


A New INQUISITION .. . LAC Rae ee 
The author refers to the coming Apaieuse 
trial. 


EVOLUTION AND Datty Living... . 49 


The author shows that evolution demands the 
highest ideals of conduct. 


CREDO oF A NATURALIST .. . fies | 


The author shows that the reverent ates of 
Nature leads to religion. 





THE EARTH SPEAKS 
TO BRYAN 





I 
THE TENNESSEE TRIAL 


“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firma- 
ment sheweth his handywork.” (Psalm 19: 1.) 


HERE is a wide difference of opinion in 
the United States, and even in other 
parts of the civilized world, about the Ten- 
nessee trial. Most people express themselves 
as strongly opposed to it. I for one am strongly 
in favor of it, and I am confident that it will 
clear the atmosphere, as in the past great his- 
toric trials of a similar character have done. 
Fortunately, we have reached a stage of 
civilization where there is no question of burn- 
ing at the stake, as with Giordano Bruno, or 
of imprisonment, as with Galileo when he de- 
clared that the earth revolved around the sun 
and that the sun itself was in motion. In the 
Tennessee case even the distinguished plain- 
tiff declares that the defendant will lose only 
his living; he will not be thrown into prison, 


he will not be excommunicated, he certainly 
1 


2 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


will not be burned at the stake. Beginning in 
1593, Giordano Bruno was imprisoned for 
seven years, and on February 17, 1600, was 
burned at the stake for firmly holding to his 
chief maxim that “the investigation of Na- 
ture in the unbiased light of reason is our only 
guide to truth.” Beginning June 24, 1633, 
Galileo Galilei, at the age of seventy, was 
imprisoned and later kept in close confine- 
ment for adhering to his theory of the motions 
of the earth and of the sun as against the 
orthodox astronomical teaching of his times. 

The reason I am in favor of this trial is that 
I take a view entirely different from that of 
most of my fellow citizens as to who is really 
on trial, as to which is the plaintiff and which 
the defendant in the case. The facts in this 
great case are that William Jennings Bryan is 
the man on trial; John Thomas Scopes is not 
the man on trial. If the case is properly set 
before the jury, Scopes will be the real plain- 
tiff, Bryan will be the real defendant. 

The brief in this case was best phrased by 
Bryan himself with his usual terseness and 
clearness when he opened this discussion in 


THE TENNESSEE TRIAL 3 


one of the great American newspapers in the 
year of our Lord 1922: 


The Real Question Is, Did God Use Evolution as His 
' Plan?” 


This is the supreme issue which the Ten- 
nessee court and the judge and jury will have 
to pass upon. All the other issues, such as 
personal rights, rights of opinion, rights of 
free speech, constitutional rights, educational 
liberty, which will undoubtedly be brought 
into the case by the counsel on both sides and 
which may for a time befuddle the minds of 
the jurors, are mere temporary side issues and 
will fade into insignificance in comparison 
with the supreme issue. If Scopes has been 
teaching the truth to his students he will win; 
if he has been teaching untruths he will lose, 
and will deserve to lose. I am a great believer 
in educational liberty, but I do not believe 
that any teacher, high or low, should pass off 
his personal opinions on the tender minds of 
students; he is at liberty only to teach truths 
which are well and soundly established. In 
this case the evolution of higher and of lower 


4 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


forms of life is as well and as soundly estab- 
lished as the eternal hills. Jt has long since 
ceased to be a theory; 1t 1s a law of Nature as 
universal in living things as is the law of gravi- 
tation in material things and in the motions 
of the heavenly spheres. 

If Bryan and his learned counsel can prove 
that God did not use evolution as His plan 
they will deserve our gratitude, and William 
Jennings Bryan will come out of the court one 
of the saviors of American youth; if, on the 
other hand, the affirmative decision is reached 
and it is shown by the learned counsel for the 
defense that God did use evolution as His 
plan, then John Thomas Scopes will walk out 
of court a free man, the governor and legis- 
lature of the State of Tennessee will convene 
to revise their recent legislation, and William 
Jennings Bryan will suffer a greater defeat 
than any he has had at the polls. Not only 
will Scopes be free, but Truth will be free, and 
the truths of Nature as distinguished from the 
transitory opinions of either scientist or theo- 
logian will be freely taught to the youth of 
our nation. 


THE TENNESSEE TRIAL 5 


Thus Haman will hang on the gallows erected 
for Mordecai! 

Nor will the twelve honest, God-fearing 
Tennesseans who are put on oath in the Day- 
ton court constitute the whole jury; a higher 
jury will be the grand jurors of all created 
time, whose voices are heard in the testimony 
of the rocks in which the injunction is ob- 
served: “Speak to the earth and it shall 
teach thee.” (Job 12:8.) 


THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS 


* Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night 
sheweth knowledge.’ (Psalm 19:2.) 

Tue Eartu Speaks, clearly, distinctly, 
and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, 
to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to 
hear a single sound. The earth speaks from 
the remotest periods in its wonderful life his- 
tory in the Archzeozoic Age, when it reveals 
only a few tissues of its primitive plants. 
Fifty million years ago it begins to speak as 
“the waters bring forth abundantly the moy- 
ing creatures that hath life.” In successive 
eons of time the various kinds of animals 


6 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


leave their remains in the rocks which com- 
pose the deeper layers of the earth, and when 
the rocks are laid bare by wind, frost, and 
storm we find wondrous lines of ascent in- 
variably following the principles of creative 
evolution, whereby the simpler and more lowly 
forms always precede the higher and more 
specialized forms. 

The earth speaks not of a succession of dis- 
tinct creations but of a continuous ascent, in 
which, as the millions of years roll by, increas- 
ing perfection of structure and beauty of form 
are found; out of the water-breathing fish 
arises the air-breathing amphibian; out of the 
land-living amphibian arises the land-living, 
air-breathing reptile, these two kinds of creep- 
ing things resembling each other closely. The 
earth speaks loudly and clearly of the ascent 
of the bird from one kind of reptile and of 
the mammal from another kind of reptile. 

This is not perhaps the way Bryan would 
have made the animals, but this is the way 
God made them! 

After the long travail of at least a million 
centuries there appear among the mammals 


THE TENNESSEE TRIAL 7 


the remote and humble ancestors of that great 
race which we ourselves have honored with 
the name of Primates because all the members 
of this race, like ourselves, live upon their 
wits, relying upon their cleverness and even 
intelligence in the eternal struggle for exist- 
ence. In clarion tones, not with uncertain 
sound, the earth tells us in both the form and 
the functions of our bodies and of our minds, 
in every nerve, in every gland, in every muscle 
which the nerves control, in the lower and 
higher centres of the brain as the royal seat 
of our primacy, in the bones which compose 
our framework, especially in the bones of the 
skull and jaws and of the foot and hand, that 
we too have ascended from lowlier ancestors 
not wholly dissimilar but never identical with 
other Primates to which we feel ourselves 
proudly superior. Let us regard them as 
“poor relations”’ if we will, they are none the 
less of the same handiwork as ourselves. 

In Darwin’s day the earth had hardly be- 
gun to speak of this relationship of ours to 
the other Primates, but Darwin’s was the 
prophet’s ear, close to the earth, which truly 


8 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


interpreted its feeble tones. To-day the earth 
speaks with resonance and clearness, and 
every ear in every civilized country of the 
world is attuned to its wonderful message of 
the creative evolution of man, except the ear 
of William Jennings Bryan; he alone remains 
stone-deaf, he alone by his own resounding 
voice drowns the eternal speech of Nature. 
How can I as the author of these essays, a 
naturalist, a professor of zoology, “a tall pro- 
fessor coming down out of the trees,” as he 
calls me, contend with the resounding voice 
of Bryan when the voices of Nature are power- 
less to do so? At once I confess that I cannot 
contend with him, nor can I still his voice, 
and this has always been my attitude since 
February, 1922, when in reply to his article 
in the New York Tvmes entitled “Evolution 
of Man,” I hastily wrote the first of my 
rejoinders, “Evolution and Religion,’ and 
thus entered the arena of Religion and Science 
in which the Great Commoner and myself 
have met at intervals during the past three 
years. My advice to my opponent is invari- 
ably and consistently the same; namely, to 


THE TENNESSEE TRIAL 9 


drop the methods of the lawyer, of the politi- 
cian, of the statesman, even of the theologian 
and of the scientist, and to adopt the simple 
methods of the naturalist, to observe and hear 
for himself the great truths which the earth 
so clearly proclaims. 

I do not enter into the well-known details 
of the wonderful processes of evolution as they 
have been conscientiously observed in plants 
and animals for a century and a half. I refer 
inquirers after truth to the published and 
readily accessible works of a long line of ob- 
servers, from Leonardo da Vinci in the fif- 
teenth century to the writers of the eleventh 
edition of the Encyclopzedia Britannica. 

As for the creative evolution of man, pass- 
ing by the early speculative writings of such 
men as Haeckel, we now have more than a 
dozen substantial volumes based not upon 
guesswork or speculation but upon the testi- 
mony yielded in the superficial layers of the 
earth and in caves, embracing hundreds of 
specimens of the fossilized remains of man, 
more or less ancient, more or less complete, 
but invariably, without a single exception, 


10 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


testifying to the gradual ascent of man from a 
lower to a higher state, gradually dropping 
one primitive bit of anatomy after another 
until the high, intelligent, fully human aspect 
is attained. 

Again with clarion voice these irrefutable 
witnesses of our past positively demonstrate 
two new and somewhat unexpected truths: 
first, that man has not descended from any 
known kind of monkey or ape, fossil or recent; 
with this truth, established not by Bryan but 
by the testimony of the earth, one of the chief 
sentimental objections to the creative evolu- 
tion of man disappears forever. Second, man 
has a long, independent, supertor line of ascent 
of his own, with a relatively erect posture, 
with hands free to grasp and use tools, with 
the thumb and forefinger capable of handling 
flint implements such as the graving tools 
and brush of the artist and, finally, the reed, 
pen, or crayon, with which to set down his 
thoughts. Challenge as we may the less per- 
fect fossil discoveries in the Trinil sands, in 
the Piltdown gravels, in the Heidelberg river- 
beds, no man can challenge the convincing 


THE TENNESSEE TRIAL 11 


testimony to the creative evolution of man 
afforded by the several complete skeletons of 
the race of the Neanderthal who lived 100,000 
years ago, nor the perfectly preserved fossil 
remains of the artistic race of the Cré- 
Magnons who lived 30,000 years ago. 

The Neanderthal hunters of 100,000 years 
ago and the Cré-Magnon artists of 30,000 
years ago are not guesswork or the fabric of 
scientific Imagination; they are realities, men 
like ourselves, the older one a much lower 
race—a, veritable missing link—the other a 
higher race with all powers equal to our own. 

At the time these fossilized artists of the 
higher Cré-Magnon race lived along the river 
borders of France all of northern Europe was — 
sinking under the burden of the titanic glacier 
which covered Belgium and northern France 
and which drove southward great herds of the 
reindeer, the woolly rhinoceros, the Arctic 
hares and lemmings. These artists painted 
and modelled in clay and rock the fossil- 
ized mammoths, and no circumstantial evi- 
dence produced in court at any time in the 
whole history of law has ever been stronger 


12 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


than this evidence that these artists, these 
reindeer, and these mammoths lived together 
in the subarctic climate of southern France 
and northern Spain. | 

The low-browed Neanderthal hunting race is 
of far greater antiquity, a fact also established 
by circumstantial evidence equally strong and 
equally convincing. When these men hunted 
the woolly rhinoceros in the half-frozen rivers 
of southern France the titanic glaciers of the 
northern hemisphere reached their arms south- 
ward from the Scandinavian peaks and from 
the central and eastern (Laurentian) high- 
lands of Canada, attaining such height and 
massiveness as to completely bury the entire 
State of New York, finally reaching their 
melting-point near the western extremity of 
Long Island and the centre of the State of 
New Jersey. This fossilized hunting race of 
the Neanderthals, low-browed, small-statured, 
ungainly, hideous of aspect, with retreating 
chin, broad nostrils, beetling eyebrows, is 
nevertheless human, beyond challenge. They 
had tender sentiments, they revered their 
dead, they believed in the future existence of 


THE TENNESSEE TRIAL 13 


the hunter in “happy hunting-grounds,” as 
evidenced in their inclusion of the finest flint 
implements in the burial of their dead. 

To sum up the testimony of the rocks, the 
evidence as regards the creative evolution of 
man is as unanswerable as that of the creative 
evolution of the entire plant and animal world. 
Man is no exception to the universal law that 
God did use evolution as His plan. 


THE STILL SMALL VOICE 


“* And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount be- 
fore the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a 
great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in 
pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in 
the wind : and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord 
was not in the earthquake: 

‘And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in 
the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”’ (I Kings 19: 
11, 12.) 


Does Evolution still the voice of conscience ? 
Does it rob us of our religion? Does it under- 
mine our morals? If taught in the schools and 
colleges as Nature teaches it, will it under- 
mine the spiritual and moral foundations and 
ideals of our youth, upon which our future 
American civilization depends ? 


14 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


This is the contention of Bryan and of the 
millions of people whom he has deceived by 
his eloquent references to the Bible as the 
source of scientific as well as of religious 
truth. On this side of the case I find myself in 
sympathy with much of Bryan’s teaching and 
preaching. I agree with many of his moral 
conclusions, I totally disagree with his pre- 
mises. Our points of agreement may be clearly 
set forth as follows: we both believe in the 
Bible and in its supreme value in moral and 
religious instruction; we both believe in Chris- 
tianity and in the principles of conduct set 
forth in the Sermon on the Mount; we both 
believe that in the future of our country we 
must retain the faith of our fathers in the 
providence of God. 

Our points of disagreement, so far as I 
understand the Great Commoner, are chiefly 
as follows: 


Bryan BELIEVES OsBoRN BELIEVES 


that the Bible is the infallible _ that the Bible is an infallible 
source of natural as well as __ source of spiritual and moral 
spiritual knowledge knowledge 


THE TENNESSEE TRIAL 15 


BryAN BELIEVES 


that the entire universe was 
suddenly created in 144 
hours, according to literal 
interpretation of the first 
chapter of Genesis 


that on the sixth day man in 
the fulness of his powers was 
suddenly created, according 
to Genesis 1:27: So God 
created man in his own 
image, in the image of God 
created he him; male and 
female created he them. 


Osporn BELIEVES 


that our entire universe and 
the universes beyond our own 
represent an incalculably long 
period of development to 
their present form 


that the life of our planet 
represents an incalculably 
long period of creative evo- 
lution which was crowned 
with the ascent of man; that 
man approaches the divine 
through a gradual develop- 
ment of his spiritual, moral, 


and intellectual faculties. 


It is not possible to express in human lan- 
guage, in human conceptions, or even in hu- 
man imagination the majestic processes of the 
universe, nor is it possible to interpret all 
the causes of the creative evolution of man. 

Neither is this the moment to discuss more 
than the remaining point at issue: Does the 
idea of creative evolution tend to elevate or 
to degrade man? ‘This issue has also been 
the work of ages of philosophy, going back 
to the early stages of human thought, cer- 
tainly as far back as 600 B.C. 

As I point out in Chapter II, the Christian - 


16 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


Fathers considered this very question with 
consummate ability. As I attempt to show in 
Chapter IV, a true conception of evolution 
compels us to adopt the highest ideals of con- 
duct. Finally, I attempt to show in Chapter 
V that, apart from the spiritual guidance of 
the Bible, Nature has been regarded from the 
earliest times as the work of God, full of moral 
beauty, truth, and splendor. 


Il 
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


“The real question 1s, Did God use evolution as His 
plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being 
made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we 
would have to accept it, regardless of its effect, for truth 
is truth and must prevail. But when there is no proof we 
have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an 
unsupported hypothesis.” —Wi.LLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN, 
New York Times, Sunday, February 26, 1922. 


APPRECIATE the invitation of The Times 

to present the state of our knowledge to- 
day regarding Darwinism and the evolution 
of man, especially in relation to religion, the 
Bible, and the all-important question of the 
moral education of our youth. Thousands of 
good people throughout this country who love 
the Bible of their fathers and are full of reli- 
gious faith have been deeply affected by the 
eloquent and sincere addresses which the Great 
Commoner has been delivering. Large audi- 
ences have listened to him in all parts of the 


Union with deep interest, and on the members 
17 


18 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


of the Kentucky legislature he made so pro- 
found an impression that this body by only a 
very harrow vote missed the exclusion of evo- 
lutionary teaching in all the schools of the 
State. 

_As evidence of Mr. Bryan’s sincerity, I have 
purposely quoted above the sentence which I 
consider the crux of his whole address, namely: 
“The real question is, Did God use evolution 
as His plan? If it could be shown that man, 
instead of being made in the image of God, is 
a development of beasts we would have to ac- 
cept it, regardless of its effect, for truth is 
truth and must prevail.” I interpret this sen- 
tence as meaning that he is open to conviction, 
even if convinced against his will. I am deeply 
impressed with the fact that he has familiar- 
ized himself with many of the debatable points 
in Darwin’s opinions, such as the theory of 
Sexual Selection, and it is not at all surprising, 
not being a specialist in biology, that he is ex- 
tremely confused—as, in fact, many evolu- 
tionists are—by the radical differences of opin- 
ion as to the power of Natural Selection itself 
expressed by recent writers such as John Bur- 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 19 


roughs and Professor Bateson. If it is difficult 
for biologists to think straight on this very 
intricate subject of evolution, how much more 
difficult must it be for the layman? I have 
elsewhere shown in a recent number of Scvence 
that Bateson is living the life of a scientific 
specialist, out of the main current of biological 
discovery, and that his opinion that we have 
failed to discover the origin of species is value- 
less and directly contrary to the truth. 

I have not yet had time to answer John Bur- 
roughs’s wholly misleading article on “ Natu- 
ral Selection” in The Atlantic Monthly, but I 
would like to state positively, as a result of 
twenty-one years of a single research for the 
United States Geological Survey, that in my 
opinion Natural Selection is the only cause of 
evolution which has thus far been discovered 
and demonstrated. I believe there are many 
other causes which remain to be discovered. 
Mr. Bryan, who is an experienced politician, 
and who has known politicians to disagree, 
should not be surprised or misled when natu- 
ralists disagree in matters of opinion. No liv- 
ing naturalist, however, so far as I know, dif- 


20 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


fers as to the immutable truth of evolution in 
the sense of the continuous fitness of plants 
and animals to their environment, and the 
ascent of all the extinct and existing forms of 
life, including man, from an original and sin- 
gle cellular state. 

There are two aspects of Mr. Bryan’s ad- 
dress: one, religious and philosophical, on 
which I may first comment, the other, natu- 
ral, or coming within the field of direct ob- 
servation, namely, the origin of species and 
the origin of man. The former affects our re- 
ligious beliefs or ideas of God and His relation 
to Nature; the latter is simply a matter of di- 
rect observation of the testimony of the earth; 
the former will always be debatable and largely 
a matter of personal faith or of scepticism; the 
latter is a matter of the laboratory, of the field 
naturalist, of indefatigable digging in all parts 
of the world among the ancient archives of 
the earth’s history. If Mr. Bryan, with an 
open heart and mind, would drop all his books 
and all the disputations among the doctors 
and study first-hand the simple archives of 
Nature, all his doubts would disappear; he 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 21 


would not lose his religion; he would become 
an evolutionist. 


“Truth Is Truth and Must Prevail’”’ 


These words constitute the solid rock on 
which enduring religion and the only endur- 
ing knowledge of Nature rest, while the shift- 
ing sands of human opinion are swept hither 
and thither both in theology and in science. 
Wrecked on these sands of opinion are many 
great names, both in theology and in science, 
but fortunately there have lived some wise 
pilots of Nature who would have kept our 
thinking straight if we had heeded their coun- 
sel. I had the good fortune to fall under the 
influence of James McCosh, natural philoso- 
pher and divine, who in his lectures on “ Chris- 
tianity and Positivism” accepted evolution, 
with most of its implications, in the year 1876. 

Thirteen years earlier,.in 1863, Charles 
Kingsley, whose religion no one has ever chal- 
lenged, struck the note of truth only four years 
after Darwin’s “Origin of Species” appeared, 
when he wrote to Frederick Maurice, one of 


22 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


the most profoundly religious men that Eng- 
land has produced: ‘Darwin is conquering 
everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by 
the mere force of truth and fact. The one or 
two who hold out [against Darwin] are forced 
to try all sorts of subterfuges as to fact, or 
else by evoking the odium theologicum.” In 
the same letter Kingsley says: “The state 
of the scientific mind is most curious; .. . 
they find that now they have got rid of an in- 
terfering God—a master-magician, as I call it 
—they have to choose between the absolute 
empire of accident, and a living, immanent, 
ever-working God.” 

Kingsley describes himself as “busy work- 
ing out points of natural theology, by the 
strange light of Huxley, Darwin, and Lyell. 
I think I shall come to something worth hav- 
ing before I have done.” Although in the van 
of the religious thinkers of his time, Kingsley 
was not in a position to answer Mr. Bryan’s 
main question: “ Did God use evolution as His 
plan?” Evolution in 1863 rested on the in- 
direct or circumstantial evidence presented 
by Darwin, while in 1922 it is the most firmly 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 23 


established truth in the natural universe and, in 
Mr. Bryan’s language, we shall have to ac- 
cept it regardless of its effect. Let us, there- 
fore, glance at some of the effects. 

I am not writing to convince evolutionists, 
I am writing to convince Mr. Bryan himself 
and his many followers. That you may avoid 
all religious doubts and difficulties, first ac- 
cept as the foundation of your faith the creed 
which runs through the Old and New Testa- 
ments alike and is best expressed in the grand 
old Latin phrase, “Pleni sunt coeli et terra 
gloria tua.’ Without this creed, you may be 
an atheist or an agnostic. With this creed 
you are in a secure citadel of faith, and when 
discovery after discovery impels you to sur- 
render the preconceptions of man in his 
ignorance as to Joshua’s belief that the sun 
moved around the earth, as to the flatness 
of the earth, as to the universe being formed 
in six days of twenty-four hours, as to all the 
millions of species of animals and plants 
being made within four days, as to man being 
made in the image of God in one day, as 
to woman being made out of the rib of man, 


24 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


you remain serene, because you humbly ac- 
cept the universe and man as God willed them. 
You may be convinced that your misgiv- 
ings and prejudices against Nature will all be 
resolved, if you simply repeat to yourself: I 
accept Nature as God made it; truth is truth 
and must prevail. 

Nothing should be more clearly or more 
emphatically taught to our youth than that 
the Bible is the story of the spiritual and moral 
progress of man, in less degree his intellectual 
progress—in these senses a perpetual source 
of inspiration, of religious consolation, and 
the most permanent foundation of conduct. 
We naturalists accept as transcendent the 
teaching that the universe is by no means the 
result of accident or chance, but of an omni- 
present beauty and order, attributed in the 
Old Testament to Jehovah, in our language 
to God. Evolution by no means takes God 
out of the universe, as Mr. Bryan supposes, 
but it greatly increases both the wonder, the 
mystery, and the marvellous order which we 
call “Natural Law,” pervading all Nature. 

No child should be taught that the Bible 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 25 


tells the story of Nature as it has been revealed 
to us through two thousand years of observa- 
tion, and especially during the last one hundred 
years. ‘There was no curiosity about Nature 
among the writers of the Bible, as there is 
little natural curiosity among Orientals to- 
day. It was not until the Book of Job was 
written, about 450 B.C., that we find the 
guiding precept of the naturalist: “Speak to 
the earth and it shall teach thee.”” When Mr. 
Bryan observes that evolution finds “no sup- 
port in the Bible,”’ he 1s absolutely right; just 
as he is absolutely wrong when he maintains 
that evolution ends in atheism. On this point 
I know I shall not convince him if I quote any 
scientific authority, but I feel that I may di- 
rect Mr. Bryan’s attention to a writer whom 
he has evidently not studied; namely, the great 
theologian of the fifth century, St. Augustine, 
354-430 A. D. I may quote St. Augustine as 
to the wisdom of leaving Nature to the nat- 
uralists: 

It very often happens that there is some ques- 


tion as to the earth or the sky, or the other ele- 
ments of this world . . . respecting which one who 


26 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


is not a Christian has knowledge derived from 
most certain reasoning or observation, and it is 
very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things 
to be carefully avoided, that a Christian speaking 
of such matters as being according to the Christian 
Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talk- 
ing such nonsense that the unbeliever perceiving 
him to be as wide from the mark as east from 
west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing. 


To Augustine also Mr. Bryan may be re- 
ferred for a sound and thoroughly modern 
theistic conception of evolution. Augustine 
held that all development takes its natural 
course through the powers imparted to mat- 
ter by the Creator; even the bodily structure 
of man himself is according to this plan, and 
therefore a product of this natural develop- 
ment; he taught that in the institution of Na- 
ture we should not look for miracles, but for 
the laws of Nature; he distinctly rejected the 
Mosaic idea of the six-day creation in favor 
of the teaching which, without violence to 
language, we may call a theory of evolution: 
that all things developed by causal energy and 
potency, not only the heavens, but also those 
living things which the waters and the earth 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 27 


produced, so that in due time, after long de- 
lays, they developed into their perfected forms. 
_ We may now leave this metaphysical part 
of the subject and return to the evidence that 
evolution was the plan and the only plan of 
Nature, that all species of animals and plants 
originated in this way, that man has ascended 
from the ranks of Nature. There was a time 
when man considered himself greatly superior 
to the animal kingdom; in fact, the Psalmist 
exalts him, giving him dominion over the 
whole earth; but since 1914, when the World 
War began, man has become more humble, 
he is not quite so confident of his superiority 
over the rest of God’s creation. 

The mode of origin of species was practically 
discovered in 1869 by a little-known German 
paleontologist by the name of Waagen, but, 
like the great discovery of Mendel in heredity, 
this truth has been long in making its way, 
even among biologists. Waagen’s observation 
that species do not originate by chance or by 
accident, as Darwin at one time supposed, but 
through a continuous and well-ordered process, 
has since been confirmed by an overwhelming 


28 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


volume of testimony, so that we are now able 
to assemble and place in order line after line 
of animals in their true evolutionary succes- 
sion, extending, in the case of what I have 
called the edition de luxe of the horses, over 
millions of years. 

We speak to the earth from Eocene times 
onward to the closing age of man, and it al- 
ways teaches us exactly the same story. These 
facts are so well known and make up such an 
army of evidence that they form the chief 
foundation of the statement that evolution 
has long since passed out of the domain of 
hypothesis and theory, to which Mr. Bryan 
refers, into the domain of natural law. Evo- 
lution takes its place with the gravitation law 
of Newton. It should be taught in our schools 
simply as Nature speaks to us about it, and 
entirely separated from the opinions, material- 
istic or theistic, which have clustered about it. 

This is my answer to Mr. Bryan’s very nat- 
ural solicitude about the influence of evolution 
in our schools and colleges—a solicitude not 
inherent in the subject itself, but in the foolish- 
ness and conceit of certain of the teachers who 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 29 


are privileged to teach of the processes of life. 

It would not be true to say that the evolu- 
tion of man rests upon evidence as complete 
as that of the horse, for example, because we 
have traced man’s ancestors back only for a 
period of 400,000 years, as geologic time was 
conservatively estimated in 1893 by Secre- 
tary Walcott of the Smithsonian Institution, 
Washington; whereas, we have traced the 
horse back for a period of 3,000,000 years, ac- 
cording to similar estimates of geologic time. 

The very recent discovery of Tertiary man 
which I have just described in Natural His- 
tory (November—December, 1921), living 
long before the Ice Age, certainly capable of 
walking in an erect position, having a hand 
and a foot fashioned like our own, also a brain 
of sufficient intelligence to fashion many dif- 
ferent kinds of implements, to make a fire, to 
make flint tools which may have been used 
for the dressing of hides as clothing, consti- 
tutes the most convincing answer to Mr. 
Bryan’s call for more evidence. It once more 
reminds us of the ignorance of man of the 
processes of Nature, and sets a new boundary 


30 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


beyond which digging in the earth for more 
of truth must be directed. This Foxhall man, 
found near Ipswich, England, thus far known 
only by the flint implements he made and his 
fire, is the last bit of evidence in the direction 
of giving man a descent line of his own far 
back in geologic time. It tends to remove 
man still farther from the great lines which 
led to the man-apes, the chimpanzee, the 
orang, the gorilla, and the gibbon. This 1s not 
guesswork, this is a fact. It is another truth 
which we shall have to accept regardless of 
its effect. No naturalist has ever ventured to 
place man so far back in geologic time as this 
actual discovery of the Foxhall man places 
him. In this instance again truth is stranger 
than hypothesis or speculation. 

Nearer to us is the Piltdown man, found 
not far from seventy-five miles to the south- 
west of Ipswich, England; still nearer in geo- 
logic time is the Heidelberg man, found on 
the Neckar River; still nearer is the Neander- 
thal man, whom we now know all about— 
his frame, his head form, his industries, his 
ceremonial burial of the dead, his belief in 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 31 


a future existence; nearer still 1s the Cré- 
Magnon man, who lived about 30,000 years 
ago, our equal if not our superior in intelli- 
gence. This chain of human ancestors was 
totally unknown to Darwin. He could not 
have even dreamed of such a flood of proof 
and truth. It is a dramatic circumstance that 
Darwin had within his reach the head of the 
Neanderthal man without realizing that it 
constituted the “missing link”’ between man 
and the lower order of creation. All this evi- 
dence is to-day within reach of every school- 
boy. It is at the service of Mr. Bryan. It 
will, we are convinced, satisfactorily answer 
in the negative his question: “Is 1t not more 
rational to believe in the creation of man by 
separate act of God than to believe in evolu- 
tion without a particle of evidence?” 

Let us accept the Bryan dictum: Truth 1s 
truth and must prevail. ‘Truth is not in our 
minds; we must seek it in Nature and in Re- 
ligion and keep on seeking until we find the 
whole truth and nothing but the truth. 


Il 
A NEW INQUISITION 


“The real question is, Did God use evolution as His 
plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being 
made in the wmage of God, 1s a development of beasts we 
would have to accept rt, regardless of rts effect, for truth 
is truth and must prevail. But when there 1s no proof we 
have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an 
unsupported hypothesis.” 


HREE years ago William Jennings Bryan 
made a pledge which he has not fulfilled. 
This pledge was published on the Lord’s Day, 
February 26, 1922, and was read by a million 
people. It was so sincere in tone and was ac- 
companied by so earnest a statement that I 
for one took it at its face value and, trusting 
that the pledge would be kept, published on 
the following Sunday, March 5, a solemn 
reply entitled “Evolution and Religion.” 
I call attention to the character of this 
pledge: Truth ws Truth and must Prevail. 
Many of my scientific friends ask me: “Why 


answer Bryan?” I reply that to me Bryan is 
32 


A NEW INQUISITION 33 


not an individual; he is a type. He presents 


the Gospel to thousands of Americans all over y 


the land who are convinced by his sermons 
that there is some antagonism between the 
Creator and His Creation, between God and 
Nature. 

Bryan’s gospel is not a truth; it is an ill- 
starred state of opinion, disastrous to true re- 
ligion, disastrous to morals, disastrous to edu- 
cation. As recently as January 30, 1925, we 
read in the daily paper: 


TENNESSEE LIKES BRYAN 


ANTI-EVOLUTIONISTS PASS BILL BARRING THEORIES 
IN SCHOOLS 


Nashville, Tenn., Jan. 28.—The lower house of 
the Tennessee General Assembly, voting 71 to 5, 
passed a bill prohibiting the teaching of evolu- 
tion in the common schools. 


The actual effect of this bill is the declara- 
tion by the legislature of one of our oldest and 
finest States that the Truth must not be 
taught in the schools of the State. Since 
500 B. C. such legislation has repeatedly come 
from ecclesiastical assemblies and from in- 


34 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


quisitorial chambers but never before in the 
history of mankind from a legislative as- 
sembly such as that of the State of Tennes- 
see. That such an inquisition should arise in 
the United States is almost incredible; that 
teachers in the schools of Tennessee should 
be compelled to deny the truths taught by 
Nature or lose their means of livelihood puts 
the State back exactly four centuries to the 
inquisitorial period of Spanish history. 

Let us commend to these new inquisitors, 
misled by Bryan, the enlightened words of 
Canon H. de Dorlodot, D.D., D.Sc., delegate 
from the Catholic University of Louvain, Bel- 
gium, on the occasion of the Darwinian Cen- 
tenary at Cambridge: 


It is no exaggeration to say that, in showing 
us a creation more grandiose than we had ever 
suspected it, Charles Darwin completed the work 
of Isaac Newton; because, for all those whose 
ears are not incapable of hearing, Darwin was the 
interpreter of the organic world, just as Newton 
was the voice from heaven come to tell us of the 
glory of the Creator, and to proclaim that the 
universe Is a work truly worthy of His hand. And 
of these two illustrious interpreters of nature, 


A NEW INQUISITION 35 


who were nurtured by your glorious university, 
it is permissible to say with the psalmist: 


“There is no speech nor language, where thetr voice 
is not heard. 
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and 
their words to the end of the world.” 
—Canon de Dorlodot: “Darwinism and 
Catholic Thought,” p. 177. 


Inasmuch as there can be no antagonism 
between the Creator and His Creation, denial 
of the truths of Nature is atheism disguised 
as religion. It is an extremely ancient form 
of atheism, of which we have written records 
as far back as five centuries B. C. These rec- 
ords we find in the two greatest epics of hu- 
man suffering—the Book of Job and the 
“Prometheus Bound” of Adschylus. 

The Book of Job, dating back to 450 B. C., 
is contemporary with “Prometheus Bound” 
of the years between 467 and 458 B. C. Job 
contains the reflections of the earliest Hebrew 
or Semitic writer on the relations of God to 
Nature, of Nature to Man. While earlier 
books of the Bible, from those of Moses, 1300- 
1200 B.C., to the Psalms, which were col- 


36 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


lected, edited, and in large part composed be- 
tween 520 and 150 B. C., are full of the in- 
spiration and glory of Nature, Job is the first 
to enjoin the scientific study of Nature. He 
presses his admonitions by a long and elo- 
quent survey of the wonders of the earth, of 
the sea, and of the heavens, which baffle hu- 
man understanding; he finds the universe full 
of order, of perfect adaptation to environ- 
ment, and of beauty, full of lessons and teach- 
ings to man. Bildad combats Job’s idea of 
the perfection of creation and declares that 
the Creator is so superior to His handiwork 
that even “the stars are not pure in His sight” 
(Job 25:5)! 

God rebukes both Bildad and Job and de- 
clares that Nature is the direct expression of 
His power and wisdom. In this declaration 
and in the Psalms are the foundations of true 
theism and true religion. Our moral and spiri- 
tual nature is strengthened, not weakened, by 
the spiritual and moral struggle for existence. 

In our perpetual search for Truth we may 
remind the Bildads and the Bryans of the 
world of the rebuke of the Lord: ‘Then the 


A NEW INQUISITION 37 


Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and 
said: Who is this that darkeneth counsel by 
words without knowledge? (38:1, 2). ... 
Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty 
instruct him? He that reproveth God, let 
him answer it (40:2)”; and of Job’s peni- 
tence: “Who is he that hideth counsel with- 
out knowledge? therefore have I uttered that 
I understood not; things too wonderful for 
me, which I knew not (42: 2, 3).” 

The spirit of scientific inquiry seems to 
have pervaded the atmosphere 500 B. C.; 
it was doubtless a subject of discussion among 
intellectual lights all around the Mediter- 
ranean. Also in the atmosphere, in the sup- 
posed interest of religion, was the spirit of 
repression of scientific inquiry. In Greece at 
the time, inquiry into the truths of Nature 
was regarded as atheistic and therefore punish- 
able by the gods. Undoubtedly William Jen- 
nings Bryan had his prototypes 500 B. C., 
who through oratory and an appeal to an 
offended Olympus made the way of question- 
ing the earth very difficult. The whole essence 
of ““Prometheus Bound”’ is the dire punish- 


38 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


ment of Prometheus for having dared to pro- 
mote the welfare of man through the scien- 
tific exploration of the earth. Prometheus is 
the personification of inquiry into the laws of 
Nature for the welfare of man. After a glori- 
ous recital of the rise of man through dis- 
coveries in astronomy, in architecture, In min- 
ing, in medicine, Prometheus places foremost 
the gift to man of reason: 


The miseries of men 

I will recount you, how, mere babes before, 
With reason I endowed them and with mind: 
And not in their disparagement I speak, 
But of my gifts to memorize the love: 
Who, firstly, seeing, knew not what they saw, 
And hearing did not hear; confusedly passed 
Thewr life-days, lingeringly, like shapes in dreams, 
Without an aim; and neither sunward homes, 
Brick-woven, nor skill of carpentry, they knew; 
But lwed, like small ants shaken with a breath, 
In sunless caves a burrowing buried life: 
Of winter’s coming no sure sign had they, 
Nor of the advent of the flowery spring, 
Of fruitful summer none: so fared through each, 
And took no thought, till that the hidden lore 
Of rising stars and setting I unveiled. 

—ZEschylus: “Prometheus Bound.” ‘Trans- 

lation by Robert Whitelaw. 1907. 


A NEW INQUISITION 39 


In my reply to Bryan I quoted a verse from 
the Book of Job that has always impressed 
me: Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee 
(Job 12:8). This admonition of the great 
Shemite and the lofty humanitarianism of 
Aeschylus direct our attention to the fact 
that Nature has been speaking since the dawn 
of humanity in no uncertain tones to those 
minds and hearts which are open to its voice. 
It may be in the earth, it may be in the wind, 
it may be in the earthquake, it may be in the 
fire, or it may be only in the “still small 
voice’’; it may be serious, solemn, awe-inspir- 
ing, and difficult to comprehend, like recent 
marvellous discoveries in physics and astrono- 
my; it may be small and apparently insignif- 
icant, while actually profoundly important 
and significant, like many of the discoveries 
in anthropology. To those serious and earnest 
seekers after the Truth, from 500 B.C. to 
the present time, we have the contrasting atti- 
tude of the Great Commoner; if all the evi- 
dence for the Truth were piled as high as Ossa 
upon Pelion, if proof were heaped upon proof, 
the Truth would not prevail with him, be- 


40 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


cause all the natural avenues of the Truth are 
tightly closed. | 

It is noteworthy that shortly after his 
pledge to accept the Truth appeared in 1922, 
the Earth spoke to Bryan and spoke from 
his own native State of Nebraska, in the 
message of a diminutive tooth, the herald of 
our knowledge of anthropoid apes in America. 
This Hesperopithecus tooth is like the “still 
small voice’’; its sound is by no means easy 
to hear. Like the hieroglyphics of Egypt, it 
requires a Rosetta Stone to give the key to 
interpretation. Our Rosetta Stone is com- 
parison with all the similar grinding teeth 
known, collected from all parts of the world, 
and described or figured in learned books and 
illustrations. By these means this little tooth 
speaks volumes of truth—truth consistent 
with all we have known before, with all that 
we have found elsewhere. 

It happens that teeth, incased in enamel, 
the most enduring animal substance in the 
whole order of living Nature, defy all the — 
vicissitudes of time and of subterranean burial 
and take first rank among Nature’s hiero- 


A NEW INQUISITION 41 


glyphics of the past. I once travelled several 
thousand miles to see a single tooth, known 
to science as Microlestes antiquus, signifying 
“the ancient little robber.”’ Despite its “rhe- 
tic’? age, surpassing the hoary antiquity of 
Jurassic time, this tiny tooth, no larger than 
a pin-head, is shown with its ancient enamel 
lustre and truthfully tells an unvarnished tale 
of the life conditions of an epoch in which the 
“ancient little robber” flourished. Some 
years afterward, while dining with the Right 
Reverend William Manning, then rector of 
Trinity Church, I sat next the Archbishop 
of York, the Most Reverend Cosmo Gordon 
Lang. Knowing the Englishman’s aversion 
to commonplaces like the weather and politics, 
I at once broached the subject of Microlestes. 
I said: “Your Grace, do you know why York 
is so famous?’’ He smiled and replied that 
he supposed it was because of the beauty of 
its cathedral. “‘No,’ I answered, “it is be- 
cause it houses the oldest tooth in the world !”’ 
He confessed that he had never seen this tooth 
but would certainly on his return to York re- 
pair to the museum for the purpose. This 


42 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


odontological introduction led us genially to 
the subject of Theodore Roosevelt and his 
Romanes Lecture in Oxford, as I have nar- 
rated elsewhere. 

The world-wide interest aroused by the dis- 
covery in Nebraska of Hesperoptthecus, “the 
ape of the Western world,” is in widest pos- 
sible contrast, to the diminutive and insignif- 
icant appearance of the single grinding tooth 
of the right side of the upper jaw, which speaks 
of the presence of the higher or manlike apes 
in our Western country at a time when the 
ancient “Territory of Nebraska”’ was in close 
touch with the animal civilization of Asia and 
of western Europe. The evidence of the tooth 
is strongly supported by many other and more 
complete fossil specimens that speak of a 
fresh tide of migration from the Old World to 
the New perhaps a million years ago, includ- 
ing antelopes, rhinoceroses, and peculiar Asi- 
atic types of horses. 

So it has been with every other great dis- 
covery bearing directly or indirectly upon 
the great question of the origin and evolution 
of man. The earth has buried its secrets as 


A NEW INQUISITION 43 


if it were reluctant to reveal the history of 
our past. 

~ What shall we do with the Nebraska tooth? 
Shall we destroy it because it jars our long 
preconceived notion that the family of man- 
like apes never reached the Western world, or 
shall we endeavor to interpret it, to discover 
its real relationship to the apes of Asia and of 
the more remote Africa? Or shall we con- 
tinue our excavations, difficult and baffling as 
they are, in the confident hope, inspired by 
the admonition of Job, that if we keep on 
speaking to the earth we shall in time have a 
more audible and distinct reply? Certainly 
we shall not banish this bit of truth because 
it does not fit in with our preconceived notions 
and because at present it constitutes infini- 
tesimal but irrefutable evidence that the man- 
apes wandered over from Asia into North 
America. 

Moreover, the mystery surrounding the 
discovery of Hesperopithecus is hardly greater 
than those which have been surmounted in 
the prehistory of man elsewhere—in Spain, 
in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Italy, 


44 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


in Hungary, in the Island of Java, in the 
Ordos of Inner Mongolia. Just at the moment 
when Asia seemed to have lost its time-honored 
Biblical reputation as the Garden of Eden of 
the human race, two devout Roman Catho- 
lics—the one a distinguished missionary of 
northern China, Pére Emile Licent, the other 
a distinguished paleontologist, Abbé Pierre 
Teilhard de Chardin—made an epoch-making 
discovery of paleolithic man of Aurignacian 
and Mousterian age in the northern valley of 
the Yellow River bordering China and south- 
ern Mongolia. Flint implements were found 
in the greatest abundance, fashioned after the 
superior Aurignacian technic, which indubita- 
bly established the presence of a large colony 
of men in this now arid region of central Asia 
during the more favorable and humid climate 
of the closing Ice Age. Skulls and bones of 
these men have not been found, but their flint 
industry speaks of an order of intelligence as 
high as that manifest in the finely formed 
skulls and foreheads of the Aurignacian men 
recently disinterred at Solutré, France. 

Only a few months before, it had been pro- 


A NEW INQUISITION 45 


claimed by one of the leading American an- 
thropologists, Doctor Ales Hrdlicka, of the 
United States National Museum, that Europe 
rather than Asia may have been the cradle of 
the human race. This proclamation rested on 
the overwhelming testimony of the presence 
of fossil man in all parts of western Europe, 
discoveries dating from the first ancient flint 
implement found in 1690, and extending over 
233 years to the sepulchres of Aurignacian 
man found in 1923 near Solutré, France. 

This discovery of the Old Stone Age in 
north China is consistent with the discovery 
of the Neolithic or New Stone Age culture 
about three years ago in China, as revealed 
by the Swedish explorer, J. M. Andersson, 
who has now been called to the University 
of Stockholm. It is also in accord with the 
prophecies of W. D. Matthew and of the pres- 
ent writer that the high plateau region of 
central Asia will prove to be the chief cradle 
of the human race. 

It is upon plateaus and relatively level up- 
lands that human and prehuman life is most 
exacting and response to stimulus most bene- 


46 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


ficial. An alert race cannot develop in a for- 
est—a forested country can never be a centre 
of ascent for man; nor can the higher type of 
man develop in a lowland river-bottom coun- 
try with plentiful food and luxuriant vegeta- 
tion. Mongolia has always been an upland 
country, through the Age of Mammals and 
before. It was probably a country only in 
part forested, mainly open, with exhilarating 
climate and conditions sufficiently difficult to 
require healthy exertion in obtaining food- 
supply. In the uplands of Mongolia condi- 
tions of life were apparently ideal for the de- 
velopment of early man, and since all the evi- 
dence points to Asia as the place of origin of 
man, and as Mongolia and Tibet, the top of 
the world, are the most favorable geographic 
regions in Asia for such an event, we shall 
sooner or later find the remote ancestors of 
man in this section of the country. 

This idea may be treated only as an opin- 
ion, but it is an opinion sufficiently sound to 
warrant the extended investigation now go- 
ing forward, and which is to be continued for 
the next five years under the leadership of 


A NEW INQUISITION 47 
Roy Chapman Andrews in the hope of finding 


evidence of primitive man in central Asia.1 
_ Man is what he is because he has never had 
an easy time of it; for at least 500,000 years 
he has been engaged in an incessant struggle 
for existence, a struggle in which his intel- 
ligence and his moral nature have played a 
very large part, certainly the predominating 
part in the higher races of man. The spiritual 
life of man, as will be more fully pointed out 
in another article, had its dawn extremely far 
back in geologic time, and belief in life after 
death was an early development. Religion, 
in the sense of belief in a supernatural power 
or powers, followed later and was accom- 
panied by superstition, magic, and the creation 
of a priesthood as intermediaries between 
man and the higher powers. 

The primitive spiritual life of man is no 


1This hope has been realized just as this volume goes to press. 
In a cable, dated Peking, June 1, 1925, Roy Chapman Andrews an- 
nounces: “‘Great success. Immediately discovered more dinosaur eggs 
and late Paleolithic [Old Stone Age] cultures, corresponding to Euro- 
pean Azilian [Upper Paleolithic Stage] thousands flints, artifacts. 
Work just begun.” This first definite proof of the existence of men 
of the Old Stone Age on the high Mongolian Plateau, taken together 
with the discovery of the Old Stone Age Man in northern China, tends 
to strongly confirm the theory that the high central Asiatic Plateau 
was one of the chief homes of primitive man. 


48 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


longer a matter of guesswork and hypothesis, 
as it was at the close of the nineteenth century 
when Herbert Spencer and Edward B. Tylor 
were theorizing upon the origin of religion. 
Through the religious practices and cere- 
monials of the existing peoples, the prehistory 
of religion comes to us in no uncertain tones 
when we speak to the earth, in stone amulets 
and charms, in ceremonial burials full of ten- 
der human sentiment, in sculptures, paintings, 
and engravings, in primitive written texts 
which we some time may be able to decipher. 
Some of these records go back over 50,000 
years, when the custom of burial began; others 
are of more recent date, belonging to the sec- 
ond cave period. 

The truth of the records which the earth 
reveals is truth of the most imperishable or- 
der, and it must prevail. It may inconveni- 
ence us, it may disturb us, it may completely 
upset many of our scientific ideas, it may run 
counter to our religious views; our duty is not 
to avoid the consequences of the truth but to 
face them and overcome them. 


IV 
EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 


All that the old Romans summed up as Virtue in the 
conduct of life is affected by evolution. This article is 
not a sermon, unless it be a sermon in stones. Belief in 
evolution demands the highest ideals in conduct ; it bears 
directly on our daily “mores’’—our usages, fashions, 
customs, and behavior. Belief in evolution and faith in 
Christianity are by no means incompatible; one can be 
both evolutionist and Christian. 


VOLUTION is challenged to-day by 
many good and well-meaning people, at 
once as an enemy of religion, as the cause of 
the rise of animalism, and as the chief cause 
of decadence in conduct. 

I am informed by the bishop of the Episco- 
pal diocese of Arizona that before a crowded 
house in Texas William Jennings Bryan re- 
cently classed me with Voltaire, Thomas 
Paine, and Robert Ingersoll as an atheist, be- 


cause I believe in Evolution. Nearer home, 
49 


50 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


John Roach Straton posted this charge on the 
front of Calvary Baptist Church: “Is the 
American Museum of Natural History Mis- 
spending the Taxpayers’ Money and Poison- 
ing the Minds of the School Children with 
False and Bestial Theories of Evolution? 
Should not the Bible be Displayed in the Mu- 
seum as well as Old Musty Bones?” I im- 
mediately sent to Doctor Straton the follow- 
ing letter:. 


Such a notice is very serious indeed. I am quite 
mindful of the Scriptural injunction which, as I 
recall it at the present moment, reads: ““Whoso 
shall offend one of these little ones which believe 
in me, it were better for him that a millstone were 
hanged about his neck and that he were drowned 
in the depth of the sea.”” The American Museum 
is visited annually by hundreds of thousands of 
children, and its lectures are attended altogether 
by millions of children. No one can point out 
either in the exhibition halls of the American 
Museum or in its lectures a single untruthful 
statement, because the lectures and the exhibi- 
tion halls do not set forth theories, but what may 
be actually observed in Nature by an intelligent 
child, if the opportunity is afforded. If you will 
examine carefully an exhibit in the Hall of the 
Age of Man you will see that it demonstrates 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 51 


very clearly not that man has descended from the 
monkeys or from the apes, but that he has a long 
and independent line of ascent of his own. 

It is not for man to question his Creator, but 
to accept every act of creation as the Act of God. 


If there is in the world anything that I love 
it is the children, and anything that I rever- 
ence it is the beauty of the child soul—the 
kind of pristine, natural beauty which Words- 
worth portrays in his “Ode on the Intimations 
of Immortality.” 

I am myself, or endeavor to be, a consistent 
evolutionist; I also undertake the far more 
difficult task of being a consistent Christian. 
I believe in the past evolution of man and in 
the present evolution of man, and I am hope- 
ful of the future evolution of man, unless his 
conduct leads to his extinction, as it is now 
doing in many parts of the world. 

As summed up in my rapidly written reply 
to Bryan’s article in the Sunday Times of 
February 26, 1922, this simple, direct teaching 
of Nature is full of moral and spiritual force, 
if we keep the element of human opinion out 
of it: 


52 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


The moral principle inherent in evolution is 
that nothing can be gained in this world with- 
out an effort; the ethical principle inherent in 
evolution ws that only the best has the right to 
survie; the spiritual principle in evolution is 
the evidence of beauty, of order, and of design 
un the daily myriad of mrracles to which we owe 


our existence. 


I believe that not alone our physical but 
our moral, our intellectual, even our spiritual, 
powers have ascended through a long, slow, 
upward movement, which we partially ex- 
press in the utterly inadequate word Evolu- 
tion; Bergson’s term Creative Evolution is far 
nearer the actual truth, because through life- 
long researches in paleontology I have come 
in my own mind to define evolution as a 
continuous creation of life fitted to a continu- 
ously changing world. This definition is made, 
not from reading the works of other biologists, 
but from my own close observations on ani- 
mal and human evolution. 

The creative evolution process actually con- 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 53 


sists of the incessant creation of new forms 
and combinations of energy in the animal 
world, of new means of enjoying the rest of 
the universe both in the animal and in the 
human world, of new moral, spiritual, and in- 
tellectual powers gained sometimes slowly, 
sometimes suddenly. This is the outstanding 
result of forty years of my own observation. 
Evolution as a greater or less development of 
the existing powers of a plant or animal is the 
least dificult part to comprehend; the crea- 
tion of new powers and faculties, especially of 
the human mind and spirit, is the most diffi- 
cult to comprehend—in fact, the incompre- 
hensible part of the whole process. 

Our knowledge of the physical evolution of 
man, of his bodily structure, has advanced so 
rapidly that the end is almost in sight; namely, 
of the whole Age of Man of the last 500,000 
years and the physical structure of man in 
the preceding Tertiary period. But the physi- 
cal structure of man is a relatively simple 
problem in comparative anatomy and paleon- 
tology. It is not his physical anatomy which 
makes man human; it is his moral, intellec- 


54 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


tual, and spiritual nature alone that makes 
him a member of the order Primates of the 
great Swedish naturalist, Linneeus. 

So far as we can observe, the foundations 
of the moral nature of man were apparently 
laid in the subhuman stages, for certainly 
three of the cardinal human virtues—such as 
protection of the family, observance of the 
rights of others, including the rights of prop- 
erty, and union for collective rights—exist in 
a very high degree in many of the living pri- 
mates, and probably existed as well in those 
as yet entirely unknown primates of the Ter- 
tiary period from which we are descended. 

Regarding the intellectual evolution of 
man, the case immediately becomes more 
difficult. I was never so impressed with this 
fact as in my journeys among the former habi- 
tations of the cavemen in northern Italy, 
France, and Spain. I soon conceived a great 
admiration for these men because of their un- 
doubted intellectual powers as observed not 
only in the superb development of the brain, 
but also in the high observational and artistic 
powers manifested in their art. I am perhaps 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 55 


more proud of having helped to redeem the 
character of the cavemen than of any other 
single achievement of mine in the field of an- 
thropology. The caveman bore, and _ still 
bears, an evil reputation of being a brute, be- 
cause few people recognize that during the 
long cave period there were two entirely dif- 
ferent types of man—one of an extremely an- 
cient lower order, known as the Neanderthal 
race of hunters, suddenly succeeded in Europe 
by one of much higher order, known as the 
Cré-Magnon race of artists. The creation of 
this man of a higher order, with his moral, 
spiritual, and intellectual powers, is utterly 
incomprehensible as purely a process of the 
survival of the fittest. 

We have every reason to believe that the 
men of the Cré-Magnon race who dominated 
northern Spain, France, and England between 
twenty-five and forty thousand years ago could 
compete in the art schools with any of the ani- 
mal sculptors and painters of our day, and 
judging from the size and form of the brain 
of the Cré-Magnon youth I believe that they 
could enter any branch of the intellectual life 


56 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


of to-day on equal, if not superior, terms. We 
know that they were mystical and supersti- 
tious and believed in magic, and were, in a 
primitive sense, religious. We know that in 
their art they were absolutely truthful and 
sincere. We know that they were reverent 
because in the thousands of drawings, etch- 
ings, and paintings they have left not a single 
irreverent one has been discovered, except in 
some of their representations of man. We 
know that they were conscientious because 
their drawing has the marks of fidelity to 
truth, to the last detail. We know that they 
loved beauty because they rapidly attained 
the full expression of beauty in the represen- 
tations of animal life. 

This emergence of the soul and of the mind 
of man prior to the poetry, the art, the litera- 
ture, the philosophy, and even the science of 
early civilization is what I refer to as the crea- 
tive element in evolution. The case of the 
Cré-Magnons is by no means unique. The 
men who wrote the epics of Homer had barely 
emerged from the northern forests. An Eskimo 
boy brought by Peary from the arctic region, 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 57 


educated by a tribe of primitive people who 
count only up to the number 5, competes suc- 
cessfully in one of our public schools. Two 
Peruvian brothers taken directly out of the 
forests attain high rank in a parochial school. 
We observe that intelligence dawned slowly 
in the mind of man, but we cannot observe 
why a mathematical mind arose before there 
was any science of numbers. 


TRIUMPH OF OBSERVATION; FAILURE OF 
SPECULATION 
The genesis of the intellectual and spiritual 
powers of man through the Lamarck-Spencer 
hypothesis of use and disuse fails as entirely 
as does the survival of the fittest or any other 
useful theory of genesis of the mind and of 
the soul. All the Lamarckian and purely ma- 
terialistic hypotheses which were current when 
I was studying philosophy and biology in 1876 
have fallen one by one by the wayside, and 
the origin of the soul of man is more of a mys- 
tery than ever. All we know is that it did not 
come in an instant of time, as Bryan believes, 
but was an age-long process. 


58 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


Every day during my forty-eight years’ 
observation and philosophy of Nature and of 
the biology of man I become more of a natu- 
ralist, less of a scientist, still less of a rational- 
ist. What has been the fate of the rationalism 
of 1876 or of the materialism of that day or 
of the other “isms’’ which were held up to 
our tender student minds as bogies? I re- 
member the catch phrases: as to materialism, 
for example: 


‘What is matter?” 
**Never mind.”’ 


‘What is mind ?”’ 
“No matter.” 


“What is the soul ?”’ 
“Tt is immaterial!”’ 


Or as to the chemical nature of intellect: 
“The brain secretes thought as the liver 
secretes bile.”’ Or as to the evolution of man 


—the parody: 


There was an ape in days that were earlier, 
Centuries passed and his hair became curlier, 
Centuries more, and his thumb gave a twist 
And he was a Man and a Positivist. 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 59 


Or the squib on clericalism, Huxley’s saying 
about the two chambers of the heart, refer- 
ring to the resemblance of the bicuspid valve 
to the bishop’s mitre: “We may always re- 
member that the tricuspid valve is on the right 
side of the heart and the mitral valve on the 
left, because a bishop is never known to be in 
the right.” 

Both scientific and religious men have 
largely passed out of this critical, polemic, 
materialistic and mechanistic period of an- 
tagonism between religion and science, and 
Bryan’s role is that of the grave-digger of 
fossil issues and controversies. 

The truth is that both sides are far more 
humble and less cocksure than they were in 
the ’70’s. Human reason in the ’70’s, after 
having been kept indoors by the theologians 
for nearly ten centuries, was like a boy out 
of school—it knew no bounds; it was full of 
brisk confidence; it did not realize, as human 
reason does to-day, that Nature is super- 
rational. We have all found that Nature is 
full of lurking surprises and contradictions in 
her methods. The bishops and clericals have 


60 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


learned that so far from the world being an- 
thropocentric, man seems to have been one 
of the last things thought of in creation. 

No overconfident rationalist of 1876 dreamt 
of radiant energy as we know it now; no one 
can dream of biology as it will be fifty years 
hence when it is studied by physical meth- 
ods. Rationalists are more humble now, be- 
cause in the hunting-field of human thought 
the scientists have taken as many falls as the 
theologians; the honors are even in this regard. 


EVOLUTION AND MORALS 


My great teacher Huxley felt the limita- 
tions of the human reason in defining himself 
as an agnostic or as an honest doubter. His 
system of teaching evolution and morals was 
diametrically opposed to that of Herbert 
Spencer, as was also his attitude toward re- 
ligion and the Bible. 

Brought up, as I was, by a devout Christian 
mother, Huxley retained his love and rever- 


ence for the English Bible: 


When the great mass of the English people de- 
clare that they want to have the children in the 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 61 


elementary schools taught the Bible, and when 
it was plain from the terms of the Act that it was 
intended that such Bible-reading should be per- 
mitted, unless good cause for prohibiting it could 
be shown, I do not see what reason there is for 
opposing that wish. Certainly, I, individually, 
could with no shadow of consistency oppose the 
teaching of the children of other people that which 
my own children are taught to do... . 

I have always been strongly in favor of secular 
education, in the sense of education without the- 
ology; but I must confess I have been no less seri- 
ously perplexed to know by what practical mea- 
sures the religious feeling, which ws the essential 
basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present 
utterly chaotic state of opinion, without the use 
of the Bible. [Italics my own.] 


For these reasons I regard Huxley’s influ- 
ence on Conduct as far more lasting than that 
of Spencer. While in 1879 the works of Her- 
bert Spencer were regarded with reverence 
and awe and were read by thousands of stu- 
dents like a new revelation of truth, the Her- 
bert Spencer system has crumbled so far as it 
depended on pure reason, so far as 1t departed 
from direct methods of observation. Ernst 
Haeckel was the great proponent of Darwin- 
ism on the Continent of Europe, and the chief 


62 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


elements of his theories of the origin and evo- 
lution of man have crumbled like those of 
Spencer. Darwin as an observer of Nature is 
still strong and will always be our master; so 
far as his works were drawn directly from Na- 
ture they are truer and more wonderful than 
ever, while the entirely speculative or ration- 
alistic side of Darwin’s philosophy has largely 
failed. Huxley, from 1863 until his death in 
1895 the boldest proponent of the evolution 
of man among English-speaking people, was 
always a very cautious thinker, overcautious 
in his theories as to the evolution of man. 
Huxley never committed himself to the sur- 
vival-of-the-fittest theory as to the origin of 
species as adequate, and in his last public ut- 
terance, the Romanes Lecture, he declared 
that we could not derive the moral or spiritual 
evolution of man from Darwin’s hypothesis of 
the struggle for existence. In this declaration, 
which has been quoted so often as divorcing 
evolution from conduct, I do not for a moment 
agree with my great master of 1879-80. We 
know far more about the actual evolution 
process than Huxley did, because in his time 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 63 


the creative element in evolution had not been 
discovered. 

A challenge to evolution now is a challenge 
to Nature itself, and Nature is the oldest and 
wisest instructor of both minds and morals. 
Cicero observed, “I turn to Nature as I would 
to God,” and this is the underlying thought 
of modern conceptions of evolution in relation 
to conduct; great religious thinkers, like St. 
Augustine, Dante, Charles Kingsley, Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, have from time to time re- 
minded us of this chief doctrine of Cicero; 
Kingsley, who followed in the steps of Cicero, 
St. Augustine, and Dante, declared that there 
could be no antithesis between the order of 
Nature and true religion. 


It may be said without scientific or religious 
prejudice that the world-wide loss of the older 
religious and Biblical foundation of morals 
has been one of the chief causes of human de- 
cadence in conduct, in literature, and in art. 
This, however, is partly due to a complete 
misunderstanding of creative evolution, which 
is a process of ascent, not of descent. 


64 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


Whereas a little knowledge of evolution has 
proved to be a very dangerous thing in hu- 
man history, a more profound knowledge of 
evolution makes it a very safe thing for the 
present and future progress of the human 
race. Lest we become too serious, let us refer 
to the immortal Pickwick. We recall where 
Sam Weller speaks of the fascination of widows 
he says: “A little widow is a dangerous thing.” 
I am often reminded of this when I see the 
first effects of science and of the principle of 
evolution not only on the student mind, but 
on the mind of the man of the street and on 
the mind of the man of letters. 

As to Nature’s firm foundations for religion 
and morals in our own day, may I refer to the 
bearing which the new creative idea of evo- 
lution has upon the old teleological argument 
for Design as set forth in Paley’s “ Evidences,” 
the standard text-book of my student days? 
Huxley once told me that Paley’s argument 
for the direct handiwork of the Creator was 
so logically, so ingeniously and convincingly 
written that he always kept it at his bedside 
for last reading at night. So long as the chance 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 65 


or fortuitous hypothesis of adaptation reigned 
Paley’s argument for the existence of God was 
set aside, but our more profound knowledge 
of creative evolution, gained by direct ob- 
servation of Nature, leaves Paley’s argument 
just as strong as it ever was. Paley’s “Evi- 
dences”” may be challenged now no more ef- 
fectively than it could be challenged in 1858. 

“O tempora, O mores,” exclaimed Cicero 
when he was outraged with the conduct of 
life, and particularly with the political life of 
Rome; Horace at the same period lamented 
the loss of the ancient virtues. Times have 
changed little since 80 B.C. and both man 
and Nature are exactly the same now as they 
were then. 

Bryan and Straton as public mentors en- 
deavor to take the place of Cicero and Horace, 
without any of their literary genius or truth- 
loving spirit; they are the demagogues of mod- 
ern conduct. We are told that Nature and 
Evolution are inconsistent with Religion and 
are undermining Conduct. Let us boldly de- 
clare that freedom of thought has led to license 
of thought and expression; let us lament the 


66 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


disuse of the Bible in its eternal influence on 
conduct; but let us not for a moment imagine 
that belief in evolution or any other great 
truth of Nature releases us from the highest 
ideals of conduct. Let us rather put every 
one of the daily practical problems of conduct 
to the crucial test of ats bearing on human prog- 
ress and on the future of our race and of human 
socrety. 

What, for example, will be the influence on 
human progress of our attitude on Religion, 
on Individualism, on Marriage, on Fashion, 
on our Intellectual and Spiritual Life, on 
Government, on Freud’s Psychology, on the 
Stage and the Movies, on Problem Literature, 
on the daily newspaper? I can prove that 
each of these current questions and problems 
bears upon the evolution of our race. 

As for the press, it may interest my readers 
to know that I invariably study the daily 
papers from the standpoint of human evolu- 
tion, because I hold that the press and the 
movies are by far the most potent influences 
upon conduct in America at the present time. 

The editorial influence of the press is al- 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 67 


most uniformly good so far as domestic mor- 
als are concerned. The news-column influence 
of the press is partly bad but mostly good, be- 
cause publicity tends on the whole to elevate 
morals. The advertising pages of the press are 
divided in their influence: health advertise- 
ments are to the good; feminine-fashion ad- 
vertisements are mostly to the bad. The 
sum of press influence is morally good but in- 
tellectually bad, because it creates what I call 
the jazz mind and a disproportionate sense 
of relative values. 


@ 


Political Politics— | Stage and 
Fashion | Athletics | Miscon- Domestic | Movies 


New York: duct 

World..... 7,589 5,757 2,889 — 9,352 

Times..... 29,317 6,070 9,148 5,027 
4,692 1,834 3,294 


American. . 438 


37,344 27,225 16,519 13,871 10,673 


Private |Politices—| Educa- | Food and 


Miscon- | Pore; i Health | Religion 
New York: duct Hissit ep or 


yyitc gh Baas 3,531 1,409 932 1,037 


Times..... 2,730 956 656 1,043 


American. . 3,613 57 692 182 


9,874 2,422 2,280 2,262 





68 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


With the aid of the School of Journalism 
of Columbia University I made a quantity 
survey of the amount of space devoted by 
three great newspapers of the day to ten prin- 
cipal subjects for the month of February, 1924. 
The measurements are made in linear col- 
umns, twenty-one inches to the column, and 
advertisements are included because adver- 
tisements dominate fashions, as shown in the 
table on the previous page. All of these 
headlined subjects are related to our daily 
life and conduct in a manner we may not be 
conscious of. 

It is observed in the above table that the 
press treats in descending order of importance 
the following subjects which daily affect our 
lives: Fashion, Athletics, Political Miscon- 
duct, Politics, national and local (. e., govern- 
ment),, the Stage and the Movies, Private 
Misconduct (crime, etc.), Foreign Politics, 
Education, Food and Health, Religion. 

Small wonder that ours is not a religious 
age; small wonder that education, which Lin- 
coln regarded as the very first concern in the 
conduct of the State, is little in our thought; 


EVOLUTION AND DAILY LIVING 69 


small wonder that the average young Amer- 
ican is convinced of prevailing political mis- 
conduct; small wonder the craze for athletics. 
It is a question whether the fine influence on 
conduct of the editorial writer is not more 
than offset by the man who arranges the news 
and advertising columns. 

And what is our own attitude on all these 
daily problems of our life? Is it constructive 
or creative? Does it tend to human ascent ? 
If our conduct works well now how will it 
work on our descendants a century hence? 
Are we living in such a way as to have de- 
scendants? This is the very newest aspect of 
the human-evolution problem, namely, what 
will be the bearing of the present-day attitude 
toward daily practical questions of conduct on 
the future of our race. 

It is not immediately obvious, but a mo- 
ment’s reflection shows that our future is in- 
evitably bound by daily practical questions 
of conduct. For example, we may smile at 
prohibition, but when we look at it from the 
standpoint of the future progress of man we 
become serious; every drinking man I knew 


70 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


in college in 1876 and every drinking student 
of mine up to the year 1890 has paid the death 
penalty, and they were all fine men who could 
hardly be spared. As the great English sur- 
geon, Sir Andrew Clarke, said to one of his 
wayward patients: “Nature forgives but 
never forgets.” 

It may amuse us to read of individualistic 
young women abandoning their husbands and 
their children, but when we Americans learn 
that as a race we are rapidly dying out our 
amusement ceases. In this connection let us 
read the Very Reverend William Ralph Inge, 
Dean of St. Paul’s, called “gloomy” because 
he has the courage to tell the truth; not 
really gloomy, he is at once the leading moral 
and scientific preacher of our times. 

I am not gloomy either, but as a consistent 
evolutionist I desire to see the conduct of the 
. young men and women of America so governed 
by religion and by evolution that they will 
evolve in the right direction. 


Vv 
CREDO OF A NATURALIST 


“The purpose of science is to develop, without preju- 
dice or preconception of any kind, a knowledge of the 
facts, the laws, and the processes of nature. The even 
more umportant task of religion, on the other hand, is to 
develop the conscience, the ideals, and the aspirations of 
mankind. Each of these two actwities represents a deep 
and vital function of the soul of man, and both are neces- 
sary for the life, the progress, and the happiness of the 
human race.’—From a Credo signed by fifteen eminent 
scientists. 


N 1876, when I began my philosophic and 
scientific studies in Princeton, the long 
struggle between Supernaturalism and Natu- 
ralism was culminating in a complete victory 
for Naturalism. In England Mill and Huxley 
had won the battle for freedom of the human 
reason; In Germany along with Haeckel’s bat- 
tles for Darwin there had sprung up an ex- 
treme form of materialism; in France the 
mechanistic teaching of Descartes was re- 


vived. The pendulum of thought had swung 
71 


72 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


completely away from the teleological or pur- 
posive interpretation of Nature that had en- 
tirely dominated the natural science of the 
first half of the century. | 

The whole rising generation of naturalists 
dropped the Bible and eagerly read Herbert 
Spencer, whose philosophy and biology be- 
came a new gospel; the successive editions 
and translations of his works were second 
only to those of Darwin. Among American 
students Spencer was still supreme as late as 
1891 when I came to Columbia. As for his 
influence among laymen, I well remember 
Judge Carter, of Fort Bridger, Wyoming, and 
his shrine of Spencer’s complete writings, en- 
cased with a photograph of the great closet 
philosopher. Now Spencer has become merely 
an historic figure in the history of natural 
philosophy; he is no longer a living force. 

In the recent writings of two of the leading 
psychologists and philosophers of America, 
Dewey, of Columbia, and McDougall, of Har- 
vard, it appears that psychologists have lost 
touch with the soul. Contrasting the older 
and orthodox psychology with the present, 


CREDO OF A NATURALIST 73 


Dewey remarks that “the soul or mind or 
consciousness was thought of as self-contained 
and self-enclosed. Now in the career of an 
individual if it is regarded as complete in it- 
self instincts clearly come before habits. 
Generalize this individualistic view, and we 
have an assumption that all customs, all 
significant episodes in the life of individuals 
can be carried directly back to the operation 
of instincts. . . . Only the hold of a tradi- 
tional conception of the singleness and sim- 
plicity of soul and self blinds us to perceiving 
what they mean: the relative fluidity and 
diversity of the constituents of selfhood.” ' 

McDougall is still more brief with the soul; 
he says that “ancient psychology accepted 
the soul, and was chiefly concerned to distin- 
guish the various functions of the soul and to 
assign them seats in the various parts of the 
body. In the modern period this type de- 
veloped into what is generally called ‘faculty 
psychology.’ ... Both the older and the 
later form of faculty psychology have long 
been discredited, even though it be admitted 

1 John Dewey, “Human Nature and Conduct” (1922), pp. 94, 138. 


74 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


that the conception of a soul or mind endowed 
with certain most fundamental faculties is one 
that we cannot wholly dispense with.” ? 

From Dewey and McDougall, I turned to 
my friend Cattell, asking him if his fellow 
psychologists had really lost the soul. He re- 
plied: “I can talk more intelligently about 
any other subject than the soul. J¢ 2s well 
known that psychology lost its soul long ago and 
is said now to be losing its mind. You should 
inquire of Descartes and the Catholic Church; 
it is a good subject for a paleontologist like 
yourself !” 

Hunting in the chambers of my memory for 
an explanation of this loss of the soul by psy- 
chologists, I asked Cattell if he recalled the 
sensation made by a paper entitled ‘‘ The Nor- 
mal Knee-Jerk.”” He reminded me that this 
was the opening article in Stanley Hall’s new 
Journal of Psychology, started in the year 
1887. This article was the curtain-raiser for 
the long-ensuing quest of the spirit of man 
by laboratory methods, mechanical, chem- 
ical, analytical, that has resulted in psychol- 

1 William McDougall, “Outline of Psychology” (1924), pp. 12, 13. 


CREDO OF A NATURALIST 15 


ogy wandering through the mazes of brain 
and nerve and sense-organ physiology, in 
which all vision of the soul has finally been 
lost. 

It would be difficult to fix the date for the 
return swing of the pendulum away from 
purely materialistic and mechanistic inter- 
pretations toward spiritual and _ teleological 
interpretations not in the least resembling the 
old but pointing toward new forms of belief 
and of faith in which there is less schism be- 
tween the teachings of Nature and the aspira- 
tions of Religion. The World War certainly 
accelerated this spiritual movement, because 
it engendered a horror of mechanism and ma- 
terialism and placed a new emphasis upon the 
spiritual basis of conduct rather than upon 
the mechanistic. The movement was not led, 
as might have been expected, by biologists, 
still less by psychologists. 

It appears that we may turn to physicists 
and physiologists for a rediscovery of the soul 
and the spiritual nature of man. Robert A. 
Millikan, the last Nobel Prize man in physics, 
tells us in 1921 that from his point of view 


76 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


there are only two ideas or beliefs upon which 
the weal or woe of the race depends and that 
the most important thing in the world rs a be- 
lief an the reality of moral and spiritual values. 
“It was because we lost that belief that the 
World War came, and if we do not now find 
a way to regain and strengthen that belief, 
then science is of no value. But, on the other 
hand, it is also true that even with that be- 
lief there is little hope of progress except 
through its twin sister, only second in impor- 
tance, namely, belief in the spirit and the 
method of Galileo, of Newton, of Faraday, 
and of the other great builders of this modern 
scientific age,—this age of the understanding 
and the control of nature, upon which iet us 
hope we are just entering.” ? 

Long before 1920 the rapprochement be- 
tween religion and science was initiated in 
Germany by Rudolf Eucken, of Jena, who 
won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1908. 
Eucken contended that “the age must win for 
itself an essentially new form of Christianity 
answering to that phase of the Spiritual Life 

1“The Significance of Radium,” Science, July, 1921. 


CREDO OF A NATURALIST ris 


to which the world’s historical development 
has led us. . . . The more clearly we realize 
that if Reason does not reside in the whole 
structure of the universe, it cannot be found 
in any single spot of it,—the sooner shall we 
be entitled to hope that the religious problem 
will win back the passionate enthusiasm that 
is its due, and that our work on it will no 
longer assume the attitude of speculative re- 
flection, but pass into the constructive action 
of a forward policy.” (“Christianity and the 
New Idealism,” 1909.) 

More recently (1921) Walter Rathenau 
gave the noblest expression of this spirit: 


Yet as surely as we know that the awakening 
soul is the divine sanctuary for which we live and 
are, that love is the redeemer who will liberate 
our innermost good and will weld us to a higher 
unity, just so surely do we recognize in the in- 
evitable world-struggle of mechanization the one 
essential—the will toward unity. In so far as we 
oppose to mechanization the token at which it 
pales, namely, transcendental philosophy, spiritual 
devotion, faith in the absolute; in so far as we illu- 
minate the true nature of mechanization, reaching 
out to the secret core of the will to unity—so far 
shall mechanization be dethroned, and constrained 


78 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


to service. ... Woe to the race and to its future 
should it remain deaf to the voice of conscience; 
should it still be petrified in materialistic apathy; 
should it rest content with tinsel; should it sub- 
mit to the bondage of selfishness and hate. We 
are not here for the sake of possessions, nor for 
the sake of power, nor for the sake of happiness; 
we are here that we may elucidate the divine ele- 
ments in the human spirit. (“Was Wird Werden,” 
1921.) 


There is more warmth in the rediscovery of 
the soul by Rathenau than there is in the 
chilling counsel on conduct by our psycholo- 
gist Dewey, who says that “a morals based 
on study of human nature instead of upon 
disregard for it would find the facts of man 
continuous with those of the rest of nature, 
and would thereby ally ethics with physics 
and biology. It would find the nature and ac- 
tivities of one person coterminous with those 
of other human beings, and therefore link 
ethics with the study of history, sociology, 
law, and economics. . . . Until the integrity 
of morals with human nature and of both 
with the environment is recognized, we shall 
be deprived of the aid of past experience to 


CREDO OF A NATURALIST 79 


cope with the most acute and deep problems 
of life.” } 

In England, religious as well as scientific 
opinion is still widely divided. The rapproche- 
ment between theology and science probably 
began in the spiritual emotions aroused in all 
minds during the World War, but this move- 
ment first took outward expression at the 
Cardiff meeting of the British Association of 
1920 in an enlightened sermon by Reverend 
E. W. Barnes, distinguished mathematician, 
Fellow of the Royal Society, and Canon of 
Westminster, now Bishop of Birmingham. 
As reported in Nature of September 2, 1920, 
“not for a long time has such a conciliatory 
attitude been presented to men of science by 
a leader in the Church as is represented by 
Canon Barnes’s address. The position taken 
up in it is one upon which the two standards 
of science and religion can be placed side by 
side to display to the world their unity of pur- 
pose. For Science and Religion are twin sis- 
ters, each studying her own sacred book of 


1 John Dewey, “Evolution and the Ethical Ideal.” Univ. of Cal. 
Chronicle, January, 1924, p. 27. 


80 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


God and building a structure which remains 
sure only when established upon the founda- 
tion of truth. ... Whatever the end may 
be, we are urged to the quest by that some- 
thing within ourselves which has produced 
from a primitive ancestry the noblest types 
of intellectual man, and regards evolution, not 
as a finite, but as an infinite process of de- 
velopment of spiritual as well as of physical 
life.” The editor of Nature in reviewing the 
epoch-making Conference of Modern Church- 
men at Oxford at the end of last August, 
quotes the scientific theologian Harnack: 
‘Tn spite of intense effort our modern thinkers 
have not succeeded in developing a satisfac- 
tory system of ethics and one corresponding 
to our deepest needs on the basis of monism. 
They will never succeed in doing so.” 

From England also, in the Gifford Lectures 
of 1922, comes C. Lloyd Morgan’s “Emergent 
Evolution.” Morgan, one of the most emi- 
nent pupils of Huxley, is at once experimental 
biologist, psychologist, natural philosopher. 
His volume reflects his culminating life- 
thought, which began in youthful conversa- 


CREDO OF A NATURALIST 81 


tion with Huxley. Huxley asked what the 
young student Morgan understood by “innate 
powers” and Morgan replied: “May not an 
internal formative tendency be as distinctly 
recognized as an internal conservative ten- 
dency ?”’ Whereas the Catholic protagonist 
Mivart, and subsequently the great naturalist 
Wallace, dwelt upon the idea of the leap or 
sudden advance from the animal to the hu- 
man state of mind and of soul, Huxley in this 
conversation dwelt upon the absence of any 
leap, upon continuity in both brain and mind 
from the animal state to the human stage. 
Morgan asked on what grounds Huxley spoke 
of brain as an antecedent of thought and why 
one might not follow Spinoza in regarding 
thought and brain as alike playing their parts 
in causing the evolution of man. In conclu- 
sion Huxley dismissed the neophyte Morgan 
with the encouraging words, “You might 
well make all this a special field of inquiry,” 
and the outcome of this kindly advice is the 
constructive scheme of evolution to which 
Morgan has devoted his life, as summed up 
in his volume “Emergent Evolution.” It 


82 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


differs from Bergson’s famous work, “Crea- 
tive Evolution,” in containing the purposive 
principle that “leads upward toward God, 
as directive Activity within a scheme which 
aims at constructive consistency.” Morgan 
continues that there may be something more 
in the heart of events than efficiency, some- 
thing more than causation, and for this he 
takes the risk of “the higher acknowledg- 
ment, the Creative Source of evolution—this 
is God.” Of the relation of brain and thought 
he says that the brain is par excellence the 
organ of the guidance of behavior; for ex- 
ample, the form and color are contained in 
the rainbow, but “‘it is the paradox of beauty 
that its expressiveness belongs to the beauti- 
ful thing itself and yet would not be there 
except for the mind.” If the idealist assert 
that color lives only at top, 7. e., in the mind, 
irrespective of physical correlates in the or- 
ganism; or if the realist assert that it lives 
only at bottom, 7. e., in the thing, irrespective 
of psychical correlates in the organism, Mor- 
gan submits that each goes beyond the evi- 
dence. Passing on from this principle of pure 


CREDO OF A NATURALIST 83 


causation Morgan thus sums up his _ philos- 
ophy: 

Hence it is taken for granted as scarcely open 
to question by practical folk, that mind is pre- 
eminently a cause of certain noteworthy changes 
in the face of nature, and is in a very special sense 
active,—so much so that the activity we feel, 
when through exercise of the will we are ourselves 
causes, best illustrates what is meant by causal 
activity. Carry this a stage further, lifting it to 
a higher plane of thought, and we have the widely 
accepted belief that ultimately all observable 
change is due to some form of Spiritual Activity. 


The timeliness of Morgan’s search of the 
spiritual is that it springs from the experience 
and observation of a highly trained zoologist 
and experimental psychologist—certainly a 
peer in his field of research. It is not the 
perishable closet philosophy of Herbert Spen- 
cer nor the brilliant abstract thought of Henri 
Bergson, thought not based on personal ex- 
perience or experiment. In reviewing his posi- 
tion Morgan states that “emergent evolution 
works upwards from matter, through life, to 
consciousness which attains in man its highest 
reflective or supra-reflective level. It accepts 


84 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


the ‘more’ at each ascending stage as that 
which is given, and accepts it to the full. 
The most subtle appreciation of the artist or 
the poet, the highest aspiration of the saint, 
are no less accepted than the blossom of the 
water-lily, the crystalline fabric of snow-flake, 
or the minute structure of the atom. Emer- 
gent evolution urges that the ‘more’ of any 
given stage, even the highest, involves the 
‘less’ of the stages which were precedent to 
it and continue to coexist with it.” He feels 
that we may acknowledge, on the one hand, a 
physical world that we observe and study 
through our senses and, on the other hand, an 
immaterial Source of all changes therein; 
namely, God, on Whom all evolutionary 
processes ultimately depend. “In my belief 
in God, on Whom all things depend, I am 
certainly not alone. I would fain not stand 
alone in combining with this belief, and all 
that it entails, that full and frank acceptance 
of the naturalistic interpretation of the world 
which is offered by emergent evolution.” 

In England again, Professor J. 5. Haldane, 
eminent physiologist, in his essay, “Biology 


~CREDO OF A NATURALIST 85 


and Religion,” tells us that he cannot regard 
the mechanistic theory of life as tenable; that 
“it involves quite impossible assumptions and 
leads us nowhere in respect of the charac- 
- teristic phenomena of life. Not only the 
newspapers, but also scientific men, continue 
to speak of the mechanism of life and _he- 
redity; I confess that such an expression has 
no meaning whatsoever to me. We cannot 
dispense with the distinctive conception of 
life. Let there be no mistake, however, 
about what this implies. It implies that the 
old conception of visible reality which Galileo 
and Newton set forth has broken down; and 
that there is no use in appealing to that con- 
ception in support of a mechanistic theory of 
life. Life would be unintelligible on that con- 
ception; but it 1s reality that science has to 
deal with, and not an ideal world of mechan- 
ism.” 

As to religion and conduct, Haldane adds: 
“We are the children of a materialistic age. 
We look for a soul consisting, if not of ordi- 
nary matter in the mechanical sense, yet of 
something which is only a thinly veiled imi- 


86 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


tation of it. We look, also, for a similarly 
constituted God. Such entities can never be 
found. God is with us, in us, and everywhere 
around us, as Jesus taught... . If I thought 
that my country could get on equally well 
without churches I should not care what was 
taught in them. But I do not think so. We 
need to be constantly reminded of that spir- 
itual reality which manifests itself in willing 
service of every kind, and without the per- 
ception of which our country would relapse 
into chaos.” 

American scientific and philosophic thought 
does not lead; it follows that of England and 
of Germany; also that of France, where since 
the World War there has been a spiritual and 
religious revival, although not, so far as the 
writer knows, in the minds of scientific men. 
However, the recent American spiritual move- 
ment did not come from abroad, but from the 
indignation aroused by the ignorant assaults 
of William Jennings Bryan on the evolution 
theory. In 1923 a statement was drawn up 
by thirty-five prominent Americans, among 
whom were fifteen eminent scientists, in- 


CREDO OF A NATURALIST 87 


cluding four mathematical physicists (Muilli- 
kan, Pupin, Noyes, Birkoff), one astronomer 
(Campbell), seven biologists (Welch, Conklin, 
Coulter, Osborn, Merriam, Walcott, Mayo), 
two civil engineers (Carty, Dunn), one psy- 
chologist (Angell). This “Jomt Statement 
upon the Relations of Science and Religion” 
is partly cited at the beginning of this article, 
and it concludes with the following sentence: 
“Tt is a sublime conception of God which is 
furnished by science, and one wholly con- 
sonant with the highest ideals of religion, 
when it represents Him as revealing Himself 
through inbreathing of life into its constituent 
matter, culminating in man with his spiritual 
nature and all his Godlike powers.”’ 

Many other eminent physicists, astrono- 
mers, biologists, and psychologists of America 
would naturally decline to subscribe to such a 
“credo of faith” as this, either because they 
are still sincerely convinced of the adequacy of 
the mechanistic theory of philosophy and of 
the psychologic creeds for the conduct of life, 
such as we have cited from Dewey and 
McDougall, or because they prefer to remain 


88 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


in the perfectly consistent and defensible for- 
tress of agnosticism erected by my old friend 
and teacher Huxley. 

For my own part, I aided my friend Milli- 
kan in the wording of the joint statement of 
the thirty-five American religious leaders, 
scientists, and men of affairs, and, with the 
fourteen other scientists, I signed it because 
I am thoroughly convinced that the natural- 
ist needs a credo or profession of his faith, 
even if this credo is very different from that 
drilled into his youthful mind and memory 
before the world entered into universal ac- 
ceptance of the law of evolution. 

I well remember the final address of a dis- 
tinguished physiologist, Henry Newell Martin, 
also a pupil of Huxley, before the American 
Society of Naturalists in Boston, in which he 
said: ““We science teachers have been mak- 
ing a great mistake; we have been develop- 
ing the minds of our students and neglecting 
their souls.” These words made a profound 
impression. I also recall a conversation with 
Huxley about the immortality of the soul and 
how reverently he approached this question. 


CREDO OF A NATURALIST 89 


The inscription on his gravestone, by Mrs. 
Huxley, is consistent with his agnostic atti- 
tude of mind: 


And if there be no meeting past the grave, 
If all is silence, darkness, yet ’tis rest; 

Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep, 
For He still giveth His beloved sleep, 

And if an endless sleep He wills, so best! 


Many of us are familiar with Huxley’s 
tribute to the Bible, not only as one of the 
most exquisite in diction, but as one of the 
most profound in conviction that our age needs 
the lofty moral teachings of the Bible. Hux- 
ley himself was brought up with very strict 
religious training by a gifted mother who was 
a devout Sabbatarian. In the life of this re- 
vered teacher and in the lives of many friends 
and colleagues in various branches of science 
of similar religious training, I have observed 
qualities of truthfulness, of straightforward- 
ness, of righteousness, of self-effacement that 
are ingrained in human character by the right 
kind of religious training and of which human 


character is defrauded by bigotry, by blind 


90 THE EARTH SPEAKS TO BRYAN 


adherence to dogma, and by the religious fa- 
naticism of such men as Bryan and Straton. 
These are the main ethical grounds for the 
credo of a naturalist. The philosophical and 
metaphysical grounds for a credo are of an 
entirely different order. They spring from the 
failure of materialism and of pure mechanism 
to give an interpretation of creative evolution 
that satisfies our reason. Our youthful con- 
fidence in the powers of reason has been shat- 
tered; like Icarus, we have taken our flight, 
and the wings of reason have ceased to sus- 
tain us. | 
If this thought of the impotence of human 
reason impresses the physicists, it impresses 
biologists still more cogently. Many biolo- 
gists have entirely abandoned mechanistic the- 
ories of adaptation and have frankly revived 
the old purposive interpretation of Nature, 
in the guise of vitalism, or élan vital. I do 
not belong to any of these schools, but if I 
have made a single contribution to biology 
which I feel confident is permanent, it is the 
profession that living Nature is purposive; it 
is the profession that Democritus was wrong 


CREDO OF A NATURALIST 91 


in raising the hypothesis of fortuity, and that 
Aristotle was right in claiming that the order 
of living things as we know them precludes 
fortuity and demonstrates purpose. 

This purpose pervades all Nature, from 
nebula to man. Herbert Spencer may call it 
the Unknowable; the naturalist, with Words- 
worth, may call it the Wisdom and Spirit of 
the Universe. 


Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe! 

Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought 
And givest to forms and images a breath 
And everlasting motion ! 















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